1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a bill or bank note handler, and in particular to a bill deposit and dispense machine to effect bill deposit and dispense operations which is installed in a bank at an inner position with respect to a counter so as to be commonly used by two tellers on the right-hand and left-hand sides of the bill handler.
In this specification, the bill handler includes a bill deposit machine, a bill dispenser, and a bill deposit and dispense machine.
2. Description of the Prior Art
For a bill deposit and dispense machine shared between two clerks, these tellers respectively take positions at the right and left sides thereof. Since the bill deposit and dispense machine possesses only one bill discharge or eject outlet, it is sometimes difficult to determine which teller should receive the discharged or ejected bills, in addition, there has been a problem that the discharge outlet generally disposed at the center of the bill deposit and dispense machine is far away from the positions of the respective tellers and hence it is not easy to take out the discharged bills.
As a bill discharge operation and a structure associated therewith to solve the problems above, there have been known those shown in FIGS. 12a to 12d.
In the configuration of FIG. 12a, there are disposed display lamps 91a and 91b in the right-hand and left-hand portions of the bill discharge outlet 90. When a bill A is discharged to the outlet 90, the display lamp 91a or 91b is turned on in association with a teller working with the bill handler. Since the teller to receive the ejected bill is indicated by use of the dislay lamp thus turned on, the clerks working at the machine are required to pay attention thereto, which imposes psychological loads on the clerks; in addition, there are disposed only simply display items and there is not provided any concrete countermeasure to prevent a mistake in the bill handling operation; consequently, bills are often mishandled by these machine operators.
The structure of FIG. 12b is described in the Japanese Patent Publication No. 60-54712. In this device, mask plates or barriers 92a and 92b are disposed at the right and left sides of the discharge outlet 90 so as to be slidable in the backward and forward directions. One of the mask plates on the side of the teller not using the bill deposit and dispense machine is set to the projected state so as to prevent the operator from taking out the bills. According to this structure, in order to effectively avoid the wrong operation, the size of the mask plates 92a and 92b is required to be increased, which deteriorates the quality of the design of the machine. In addition, since the bills are ejected toward the forward direction, it is not easy for the teller to take out the bills from the right or left positions.
In the configurations of FIGS. 12c and 12d, a bill discharge outlet 90 from which bills are ejected toward an upward direction is provided with a guide member 93 so as to develop a swing motion. This guide member 93 is allowed to tilt toward the clerk using the machine. This enables the pertinent clerk to easily take out the bills and prevents the other clerk not using the machine from taking out the bills. However, since the guide member 93 is disposed to project upward in any situation, the quality of the design is deteriorated.
On the other hand, as for the bill inlet of the bill deposit and dispense machine, since two tellers share one inlet, while a teller is handling a transaction by use of the machine, the other teller cannot operate the machine and hence is required to check the operation of the teller until the operation of the machine is completed, which imposes a heavy load in a busy period of time and which prevents the operator from concentrating on the transaction job.
In addition, in a case where one of the tellers continuously carries out depositing transactions, before the preceding transaction is finished, the succeeding transaction cannot be started; moreover, since the deposit operation is to be achieved after the preceding transaction is completed, there is a period of time which is unused, which consequently lowers the efficiency of the operation.